Oscillons and cathode rays: photographic hybrids in early computer art

Abstract

Computer art emerged in the 1950s and 60s as a strange hybrid of analogue and digital technologies. Although not always acknowledged, photography plays an important role within this early history. During a period when computers were first being coaxed into generating images, photography was often a necessary technology of capture for screen and projection effects that would otherwise remain undocumented. Photography served as the preservational memory of these early visual experiments. This essay will consider two examples of early computer art documented photographically: Ben F. Laposky’s “Oscillon” works (produced with an analogue oscilloscope) and the digital images produced by A. Michael Noll at Bell Labs. These early examples of computer art are images that reveal the porous boundaries between science and art, the analogue and the digital, the computational and the photographic. They offer an important precedent to our current moment of digital post-photography, in which the technological status and very definition of the photographic is under review. These early moments of computer art encourage us to consider the complex nature of digital images and the complex material infrastructures involved in their creation, preservation and distribution.

Acknowledgements

Research for this essay was conducted while I was a Visiting Research Fellow at the V&A Research Institute (VARI). I would like to thank the curators, librarians and archivists at the V&A who assisted with this research. Special thanks to VARI Head Joanna Norman, Senior Curator Douglas Dodds, Curator Melanie Lenz, Curator Natalie Kane and Senior Curator Corinna Gardner.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. I had the opportunity to work with these materials as a visiting research fellow at the V&A Museum in 2019. The Vasari Research Centre for Art and Technology, which I now direct at Birkbeck, University of London, has a long history of engagement with the collection and the fellowship was an opportunity for me to familiarize myself with both the history of computer art and the history of my own research centre, including the pioneering work in computer art of my Vasari predecessors such as Nick Lambert, Charlie Gere and Francesca Franco.

2. See Henning, “New Lamps” and Lister, “Introduction.”

3. Hoelzl and Marie, Softimage.

4. Rubinstein and Sluis, “A Life More Photographic.”

5. Dodds, “Digital Pioneers,” 9.

6. The AHRC-funded Computer Art & Technocultures project, a collaboration between Birkbeck and the V&A, helped research and catalogue these incoming materials. The project involved my predecessors at Birkbeck’s Vasari Research Centre, Nick Lambert, Jeremy Gardiner and Francesca Franco, working alongside the V&A’s Douglas Dodds and Honor Beddard.

7. Holzman, “Atoms to Astronomy,” 159.

8. Dodds “Computer Art,” 81. The California home of Prince and Holzman became something of a hub for computer artists of the period and the V&A archive contains a number of snapshots of gatherings held at the house attended by notable artists, scientists and animators.

9. Prince, “Imaging by Numbers,” 91.

10. Taylor, When the Machines, 67.

11. Franke, Computer Graphics, 97.

12. Shane, “Laposky,” 21.

13. Laposky, “Oscillons,” 353.

14. Franke, Computer Graphics, 11.

15. For a more detailed technical description of both the cathode ray tube and the Charactron tube discussed later see Jacob Gaboury’s excellent history of computer graphics screen technology “The Random-Access Image: Memory and the History of the Computer Screen,” which also begins with Laposky’s oscilloscope experiments.

16. Laposky, Electronic Abstractions, 1.

17. Ibid., 15.

18. Ibid., 15. This would seem to place Laposky as a forefather of both computer art and the “circuit bending” tradition espoused by later DIY electronics figures like Reed Ghazala (see Parikka and Hertz “Zombie Media”).

19. Laposky, “Oscillons,” 351.

20. Laposky, “Electronic Abstracts,” 344. On the Seeing Sound conference website Laposky’s great nephew Skooby Laposky provides a wonderful photograph of the artist operating his colour wheel along with a bank of electronic modification devices https://www.seeingsound.co.uk/seeing-sound-2020/2020-presentations/.

21. In Laposky, “Electronic Abstracts,” 340.

22. See note 13 above.

23. V&A Archives File Laposky, Ben (AAD/2009/19/10/53).

24. Ibid.

25. Laposky, “Oscillons,” 350.

26. Laposky, Electronic Abstractions, 3.

27. Rubinstein and Sluis, “The Digital Image,” 30.

28. Green, “Marking Time,” 21.

29. Nardelli, “End(ur)ing Photography,”161.

30. Henning, Photography: The Unfettered Image, 21.

31. Rubinstein and Sluis, “The Digital Image,” 30.

32. Hoelzl and Marie, Softimage, 15.

33. Ibid., 18 (emphasis is theirs).

34. Gertner, The Idea Factory.

35. Noll, “Early Digital,” 56.

36. Patterson, Peripheral Vision, xiii.

37. Stromberg Carlson, SC-4020 Information Manual, 3.

38. Ibid., 4.

39. Dietrich, “Visual Intelligence,” 164.

40. See note 35 above.

41. Noll, “Patterns by 7090,” 4.

42. V&A Archives File A. M. Noll (AAD/2009/19/10/74).

43. Noll, “Digital Computer as Creative Medium,” 94.

44. Noll, “Howard Wise Gallery Show,” 232.

45. See Bredekamp et al., The Technical Image.

46. Wise had seen Julesz’s stereograms reproduced on the cover of Scientific America and contacted the scientist with the hope of exhibiting the images (Noll, “Howard Wise Gallery Show”). Earlier the same year, an exhibition of Georg Nees’ work entitled “Computergrafik” was organized by Max Bense in the study rooms of the University of Stuttgart.

47. Noll, “Howard Wise Gallery Show,” 233.

48. Noll, “Computers and the Visual Arts,” 67.

49. Ibid.

50. Ibid.

51. See Noll’s personal website http://noll.uscannenberg.org/CompArtExamples.htm.

52. MOMA, “Responsive Eye Press Release.”

53. Noll, “Computers and the Visual Arts,” 69.

54. Noll, “Howard Wise Gallery Show,” 238.

55. See note 43 above.

56. Hui, Existence of Digital Objects.

57. Toister, Photography from Turin Shroud, 200 (italics are his).

58. Rubinstein and Sluis, “The Digital Image,” 29.

59. Hoelzl and Marie, Softimage, 3.

60. Rubinstein and Sluis, “The Digital Image,” 34.

61. Drucker, Visualization and Interpretation, 29.

62. Drucker, “Digital Ontologies,” 143.

63. Ibid.

64. Ibid.

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Joel McKim

Joel McKim is Senior Lecturer in Digital Media and Culture and Director of the Vasari Research Centre for Art and Technology at Birkbeck, University of London. He was recently a visiting research fellow at the V&A, working with the museum’s Computer Art Collection. He is the author of Architecture, Media and Memory: Facing Complexity in Post-911 New York (Bloomsbury 2018). He is currently completing a book on digital animation in art, architecture and design.